As the Internet has been widely used, Internet-based electronic commerce for people all over the world has been performed, communication between users has also been developed, and various types of communications have been provided on the Internet.
Internet telephones that will substitute for cable telephones have been used in addition to electronic mail and file transmission that are the most basic Internet communication tools, and it is also possible to transmit short messages to a mobile phone on the Internet. Further, a chat system which is an Internet-based multi-user communication system has been provided, and voice chat systems and video chat systems have been developed on the Internet in addition to text chat systems. Communities in which a plurality of users gathers together and communicate documents or opinions for the same topic have been activated.
The community has various items such as cafés, blogs, homepages, clubs, and mini-homepages, and the community shows various contents. In general, respective users who are registered as members of the cafés or clubs post contents or data on a predetermined topic on the notice boards, and users who have opened blogs or mini-homepages post their opinions or data on the bulletin boards.
It is conventionally needed to directly access a community and find contents when the user desires to see or receive the contents posted in the community, and as search techniques have been developed recently, the contents search process based on a search word is performed for respective categories such as web documents, news, images, and dictionaries when the user only inputs the search word corresponding to the desired contents on the web browser, and the search process for the community that has information corresponding to the above-noted search word in the communities such as cafés or blogs is to search the contents that correspond to the search word from among the contents (or data) posted in the communities. Therefore, the user can search for predetermined contents posted in the community without individual access to the community, and know the community that has information related to the search word.
However, many of the contents provided as a result of searching communities have no contents worth referring to since the search process is conventionally performed according to the inclusion status of the search word. That is, in the prior art, when the communities are searched, communities having the input search word are searched, articles including the search word are searched from among the articles of the communities, and sorting menus including the search word are searched from among a plurality of contents sorting menus (e.g., bulletin boards) provided by the communities, and thereby the search process is performed according to the inclusion status of search words.
Accordingly, it is difficult in the prior art to find contents with reliable information for each search process since the search process is performed according to the same condition even though search conditions with different references are required depending on the features of things to be searched, such as a community search, an article search, and a sorting menu search.
[Technical Problem]
It is an advantage of the present invention to search targets with difference references and provide reliable search results for the respective targets.
It is an advantage of the present invention to control the order of arranging the searched targets to be changeable and thereby easily checking reliable information for the search word input by the user.
[Technical Solution]
In one aspect of the present invention, a method for searching information on a search word provided by a user terminal in a system connected to a plurality of user terminals through a network comprises: a) establishing search targets to be searched based on a search word when the search word is provided by a user terminal through the network; b) performing a search process by applying different search references, e.g., criteria, to the respective search targets; and c) providing search results for the respective search targets.
In another aspect of the present invention, in a method for searching information on a search word provided by a user terminal in a system connected to a plurality of user terminals through a network, a method for providing search results comprises: a) searching respective search targets based on a search word when the search word is provided by a user terminal through the network; b) providing a search result to each search target; c) checking the search target selected by the user after provision of search results; d) recording search log 15 information for indicating the search target selected by the user in correspondence to the search word; and e) analyzing the search log information and determining the sorting order of the search targets according to the order of search targets initially selected by the users for the respective search words when the search results are provided, and b) comprises: when the search results are provided, sorting the search targets according to the sorting order following an analysis of search log information of the search word, and providing search results for the respective search targets.
In still another aspect of the present invention, a system being connected to a plurality of users through a network and searching information on a search word provided by the user terminal comprises: a searcher for searching information having a search word when the search word is provided by a user terminal through the network; a reliability estimator for estimating reliability for indicating how reliable information the searched information provides is by applying different search references to information searched for the respective search targets; and a search result provider for providing searched information to the user according to the reliabilities estimated for the respective search targets.
In still yet another aspect of the present invention, a method for searching information on a search word provided by a user terminal in a system connected to a plurality of user terminals through a network comprises: a) establishing search targets to be searched based on a search word when the search word is provided by a user terminal through the network; b) searching information having the search word for each search target; c) generating reliabilities of information searched for the respective search targets by applying different search references; d) determining the order of sorting the search targets according to the search word; and e) sorting the search targets according to the sorting order, sorting information searched for each search target according to the estimated reliabilities, and providing the information to the user.